Over the weekend I spotted a billboard that delivered some very bad news: Hey, Hey It’s Saturday is coming back. Online research reveals they’ve been given a run of twenty episode based on the strength of last year’s revival shows, and that they’ll be aired on Wednesday nights in an act of true cognitive dissonance. Darryl Summers is still going to be at the helm, although there’s no news as to which female co-host he’s planning on denigrating this time around.
I’ve only got three words in response to this: What. The. Fuck?
I’m not entirely sure there’s a good way to explain the lurking evil of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday to non-Australians, but suffice to say that it’s got a fine history of being hosted by a malignant, misogynist gnome who simply refuses to die no matter how many fucking gaffs he makes over the course of his career. It’s a show that routinely built its humor out of the humiliation of others and the othered, and I actually celebrated the first time it got cancelled (and wailed in despair when they announced Summers as the host of whatever Celebrity dancing show he hosted a few years back, for in that moment I saw Hey Hey’s return and trembled). Worse, it’s evil is kind of insidious, because it cloaks itself in a defense of nostalgic Australiana and normalises its behaviour. When Harry Connick Junior protested the inclusions of a blackface skit of the Jackson Five during last years nostalgia showcase the tide of public opinion quickly turned towards some bullshit defence of the skit under patriotic grounds.
It’s rare that I get seriously mad, but come on: fuck that shit. Hey Hey It’s Saturday is fucking evil and it deserves to die without it’s passing being lamented.
I’m quietly hoping that this return is a temporary abnormality, or that they’ll fuck-up early on and get their slot pulled. If that doesn’t happen I’m going to swear a lot and try and genetically engineer a deadly virus that only attacks people based on their AC Neilson figures. ‘Cause I swear to god, if there’s anything that’d convince me to sink the next ten years into unrealistic micro-biological research despite my complete lack of aptitude for the sciences, it’s the continued existence of this fucking show.
